Travelling In Your Own Microworld

by Chris Mitchell on January 29, 2008

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When we travel, where do we really go? Author Will Self gives a fascinating talk at the Google campus about the nature of travel and psychogeography

This is an hour long talk given by Will Self last November at the Google Campus, as part of their Authors @ Google series. It’s worth watching in its entirety – Self is one of the UK’s best novelists and journalists, too.

After a quick reading about his run-in with American immigration, Self goes on to discuss what actually happens when we go travelling – how we often reduce our experience of a place down to a microworld, where we have little real sense of that place’s size, geography, history – indeed, where we barely know anything about it. The speed of travel has brought about this fundamental dislocation from our travel locations, and Self gives a great explanation of the topic that makes it seem deeply obvious and yet unarguably important too.

Self and legendary illustrator Ralph Steadman recently published a collection of their long-running Independent newspaper columns in the book PsychoGeography, which tackles “the vexed relationship between psyche and place in a globalised world”.

You can read more about Self at his official site will-self.com, which I happen to co-edit too.


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